Was not directed at him and I do not think that part of my reply indicates this in any way.

I don't understand, every sentence directly referenced him. How's that not directed to him?

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...that he and the others at id weren't the sort of super-beings that they are often made out to be.

If people take Carmack & Co as some kind superbeings, that's their business and we should not take *them* (the people seeing him as a superbeing) too seriously. But it seems to me that this sort of invokes this knee-jerk reaction with some people here, that doesn't allways seem very justified.

Who's lashing out? As far as I can see Carmack is taking flak for not being God, and a couple of people are pointing out that maybe that's not entirely fair.

That's exactly my point! I couldn't have said it better

Just to be clear, I'm actually not at all concerned with mr Carmack that much and certainly not one of his worshippers (if that's what some people are thinking). Actually I much preferred working with the Unreal engine over Carmack's engines back in the days when there was still a fair comparison.

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Actually, from where I standing, it looks like some people are claiming he's god, and others are saying that he might just be human.

Nice discussion. I think Carmack is one of the greatest game engine programmers of his generation. There is only one person i would put on the same stair with Carmack and thats Tim Sweeney. Both of 'em could be seen as big geeks who have been walking through the right doors at the right time. Though their achievements and ideas have been taken from various math formulars and contributed to the gaming industry. In the last interview with sweeney i read, he said would not have get all that cool math thingy without his engineering study.

In the end i think, every programmer in the gaming industry that contribute something really valuable in the industry is being weighted by his fans more or less. Therefor a comparisson with today and previous won't be fair. They just used the right door

Don't forget that some technologies of ID Software promoted by John Carmack are based on some French scientific researches, for example some algorithms used in the implementation of the Megatexture. He is talented, he says some pertinent things but I don't share his "neutral" vision of the computer science, I disagree with him concerning some critics of Java and OpenGL. He is not God and I'm sure the next "John Carmack" will be a Java programmer, one of you. Go on programming nice games, ok guys?

Don't forget that some technologies of ID Software promoted by John Carmack are based on some French scientific researches, for example some algorithms used in the implementation of the Megatexture.

Megatextureing is based on clipmaps that has been around for a long time. The unique thing ID software has done is to use on all geometry not just terrain. Don't think anyone else has done this. More importantly they have used it in a real game. Creating all the tools and infrastructure need to generate all the data needed, and compressing it onto a dvd.

Alex St. John: When are you going to do a Java version of Quake? John Carmack: Java has a lot of wonderful advantages as a program development language and I do plan, after we ﬁnish Quake 2, to go off and develop something signiﬁcant in Java to feel-up the language. I haven’t done hands-on work with Java, but I think there’s really something there to be gained. We don’t have a lot of ties holding us back at id and we developed on this crazy NextStep platform for a long time and we’re willing to push OpenGL or maybe jump to Rhapsody. And if Java pans out the way I think it might, then we might write a lot of things in Java.

Alex St. John: Do you think Java is fast enough for games? John Carmack: This is one thing that I don’t really understand about the whole Java marketplace and the way it’s being presented. It also ties to this bytecode portability stuff and there’s no damn good reason for that. Why don’t we just have Java and X86 compilers? I like the language–I don’t care about bytecode.

Alex St. John: The portability of Java isn’t a feature. It’s just a language, and it would be nice to have a better compiler. John Carmack: Exactly. I think it’s a language that in many ways is better than C++ and I’d rather develop something in that, but it’s all tied-up in this non-proprietary, run-anywhere type of thing, which is not what I care about.

Alex St. John: The whole Java virtual machine thing doesn’t turn you on? John Carmack: No, not at all. I like the language. In general, I’m willing to spend performance to make a better product. And that’s one thing that has taken me awhile to kind of mature to because all game programmers start off on ”I can do this in 10 cycles!” And games have gotten so complex where Quake is practically an operating system. It’s this architecture, with all these different things that plug-in different ways, and it’s not just this little thing that draws to the screen.

And, from another old Gamasutra article on the development of the Trinity project:

"John Carmack considered using Java in id's games for quite some time, ever since he announced that the company was leaning towards client-downloadable code for the Trinity project."

However, at the time, key platforms like Linux did not have the Java technology that is available to them today and was the main reason John did not choose Java. Had nothing to do with performance:

"Ironically, it was Java portability problems that led id to develop the Quake 3 custom VM. Sun's promise of "write once, run anywhere" did not hold for the Invocation API on important server platforms, so Carmack decided to abandon the embedded JVM he had planned to use."

He then goes on to state:

"Having made the decision to do my own interpreter, I feel much more at ease not having to rely on anyone else's external code. When it comes around to the next development cycle, I will make the Java decision again."

Having built their own VM, it was easier for John and company to continue their homebrew technology. Had Java technology, back then, been where it is today, we would not be having this discussion

So, many reasons why John didn't use Java. In my discussions with him, he believes that Java would be fine just what's the point? They have their own tech and he likes to build such stuff. Remember, John doesn't build games, he builds tech that id Software uses to make games.

They could activate simd for the 64bit compiler right now as data in the 64bit jvm is always 16byte aligned. Unfortunately array objects in the 32bit jvm are difficult to re-align during garbage collection. After I finish my current project I'm going bang my head against that wall again.

WRT AOT compilation - I had thought that a cross-compiler from Java to, say, C++ wouldn't really be so amazingly hard to accomplish; the harder bit is that bootstrap runtime it needs to live on that includes the garbage collector and allocator. I doubt it would massively affect perceived speed. If you're properly interested, you want to simply buy Excelsior JET. It's really not that expensive considering its rather specialist use and it's extra bloody fast.

There is also GCJ (free), not sure if they've managed to fix/replace the really crappy garbage collector they were using (last I tried was about 2 years ago) but other than that it was working reasonably well.

edit: just had a look at svn history of GCJ, seems like its still pretty actively being worked on.

What's causing your continuous claims to fame, Jullian? The freaking French are not superiour.Who cares, it just as well might have been an Hungarian guy that came up with it.

I don't mind the nationality. If these scientists were American, it would be the same for me. But I wanted to point out that Carmack did not design all the algorithms behind MegaTexture. Sorry if I was not clear. I'm not nationalist, I don't think French are superior, I think that it is important to fund the fundamental researches, it has an impact on video games too.

You hit the nail on the head. Perception is one of the single biggest issues with Java; primarily on the dev. side of the house. And that is the most difficult to change.

There is the, uhh, embarrassing fact that Excelsior JET more or less blows any runtimes into the weeds. Perception-wise at least. I recall years and years ago compiling Alien Flux with JET - it started in the blink of an eye and ran smooth as silk. It would probably be extra cunning of Oracle to buy Exelsior at some point soon.

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